[native_samples]

They tend to reach smaller audiences but not that much smaller. It's been only a few months since Alex Berenson got banned from Twitter (for a tweet that contained true statements taken from the US government's own documents, sigh), and his audience on Substack is now closing in on his prior Twitter audience. Given they're different mediums and he would have had some lapsed followers (e.g. who followed him in older times but no longer paid attention), that's not too bad, especially as it's much easier to monetize the new Substack audience.

Other people who got cancelled or pushed out - like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald - now stand to get really very rich indeed off their new audiences. Writing, it turns out, can be profitable. Just not the sort of writing you find in most media outlets. This also applies to Scott Alexander, quoted above, though he wasn't directly cancelled, "just" doxxed by the New York Times.

Does this fuel extremism? Well it certainly fuels distrust of large institutions and mainstream media narratives, although what "mainstream" means is increasingly unclear. Joe Rogan pointed out the other day that given CNN's tiny audience sizes, it's really Rogan that's mainstream and CNN that's the fringe now. Groups like CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC seem increasingly extremist to me. The rationality and moderation you might hope for from older journalistic institutions is now to be found elsewhere, like the places they like to insinuate are full of extremists.